Wearable & Mobile Health Device Makers: How to Get from “Me-Too” to “Something New”

With key players like Apple and Samsung making a big push into digital health and wellness, the competition is getting fierce. To take advantage of expanding opportunities, companies large and small are looking for a way to differentiate their products and services in an increasingly crowded field.

For makers of wearable devices, a “me-too” approach has become untenable. Devices based on traditional PPG (photoplethysmography) technology are rushing into the market, pushing manufacturers to adopt a drive-to-the-bottom pricing model that can’t be sustained. With their often inaccurate and rudimentary metrics, PPG-based devices only offer static heart-rate measurements. They also offer little chance of delivering distinctive products for consumers increasingly looking for more meaningful metrics about their personal wellbeing.

Advanced Biometrics Come of Age

Electrical biosensors previously found only in high-end medical equipment have become practical for use in consumer wearable and mobile device applications. ECG-based (electrocardiography) technologies that were once only available to medical specialists now enable a variety of easy-to-understand health and wellness metrics. Today’s electrical biosensors deliver compelling solutions that provide consumers with more insights into their personal wellbeing — without venturing into regulated medical uses that consumer electronics providers typically seek to avoid. As such, they are also enabling device makers and service providers stand out in the marketplace.

In contrast to light-based PPG solutions, electrical biosensors can provide complete system-on-a-chip solutions that, when coupled with interpretive, signal-processing algorithms, deliver the widest range of fitness metrics, including mood, stress, heart rate variability, heart recovery, fatigue, respiration rates, and others in the near future. That’s because, unlike PPG, ECG-based solutions capture comprehensive signals of overall heart performance, enabling them to provide a growing number of biometrics with just a simple software upgrade to the algorithms. That, in turn, enables solution providers to be on the leading edge of delivering the most insightful, personalized health and wellness trends to their customers.

See More, Be Better

Advanced electrical biosensors along with analytical algorithms unlock the hidden value in fitness metrics. By making a richer feature set available, such solutions allow manufacturers to strongly differentiate their devices. And, since they’re built on an all-in-one platform, the latest electrical biosensor-based solutions accelerate time-to-market and can be less costly to develop.

Benefits for Service Providers

Digital health tracking services are also looking for ways to add value and hasten time to market. Since service providers typically need to generate health metrics across large populations (e.g., evaluating stress and fatigue in a corporate workforce or heart fitness for health insurance consumers), they have to create apps and cloud-based functions that can deliver a broad range of metrics for proactive analysis. Again, an electrical, ECG-based biosensor solution backed by a variety of specialized tracking biometrics provides a compelling foundation for a high-value health, wellness, and fitness services platform.

Changing Behavior for a Healthier Future

Electrical biosensors with tightly integrated analytical tools play a critical role in today’s digital health revolution. Recent advances in mobile, wireless, and semiconductor technologies make it possible to build wearables that can acquire and process an increasingly complex set of bio-signals generated by the human body.

In tandem with smartphone and tablet apps, interpreted metrics enable trend analyses that give consumers a better understanding of personal fitness and provide caregivers a window into a patient’s overall health. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver actionable information that, if needed, prompts people to change their behavior and get on the path to healthier living. Or as we say at NeuroSky, “See More. Be Better.”

New biosensor-driven technologies are enabling wearable devices that capture and analyze complex cardiovascular bio-signals in ways never before possible. Download this whitepaper to learn the pros and cons of today’s principal solutions.

About NeuroSky

NeuroSky technologies enable the most insightful and easy-to-understand health and wellness biometrics for mobile solutions, wearable devices, and service providers. The company’s proprietary, market-leading biosensor technologies provide a foundation for analyzing biometric data in a way that’s never before been practical. NeuroSky-enabled solutions deliver unique insights into body and mind health and wellness that can motivate people to make better lifestyle choices.